Casualties of Retcon I: Guy Gardner

DC, as of this writing, holds the record for most consecutive revisions of continuity that failed to take. We may begin counting with their introduction of the "Earth-2" concept to explain away the products of DC's Golden Age, a revision from the early sixties; then, we follow with the Crisis event in 1985 and Zero Hour, a derivative of the Crisis, in 1994.

One might expect, at some point, that DC would either get it "right" or rethink the sort of draconian continuity policy that invariably makes such revisions necessary. As yet, though, DC simply plods along, awaiting the next opportunity for some mega-crossover event to provide the pretext for revising the company's inherited history.

A character gets off easy in the purges of retconning if he gets to begin from scratch again, remains completely unaffected, or vanishes altogether. In each of these cases, the characters and the readers need not try to figure out the incomprehensible changes made in a character either to scrape away a crust of bad stories in his past or to avoid contradicting some new change in the overall shared universe.

Guy Gardner, DC's third Green Lantern, went through such an absurd taffy-pull of retroactive continuity changes that we should admire DC for avoiding the path of least resistance; the character, amazingly, still appears in print after a series of changes that forced DC to abandon more-established characters.

The Original Guy Gardner

This Green Lantern cover adequately explains why DC created Guy Gardner in the first place. In the Silver Age and afterwards, a number of stories dealt with the "new holder of the title," particularly for Superman and Flash; such stories typically described a newcomer who pretended to the position held by the more senior hero and imposed their pretentions by a surprising display of brute force. This formula generally included some clever ruse by the senior hero to return to his place as king of the hill, and frequently ended in some catastrophe that stripped the rival of his powers, lest he return to cause problems in the future.

The logic of Green Lantern imposed certain limits on expressing the normal "replacement-by-a-rival" story, though. For Guy to appear as a Green Lantern meant that he must either steal the current Green Lantern's equipment or actually possess the credential of membership in the Green Lantern Corps. The writers opted for the latter, postulating that Guy represented a first runner-up in the selection process that made Hal Jordan a Green Lantern. Thus, Guy represented an understudy who would take on Hal Jordan's responsibilities should he somehow become unable to discharge them himself.

As originally portrayed, Guy represented a disposable character who need not and did not recurrently appear in the original run of Green Lantern. He simply provided a footnote in the files of Green Lantern's background, along with lists of the other Lanterns from the other sectors of space, sidekicks, girlfriends, and enemies. By the time another story dealt with the need to maintain a replacement Green Lantern, Dennis O'Neil and Neal Adams decided to redirect the subject into a more topical channel and created DC's fourth Green Lantern, John Stewart, a Black man who could provide Hal Jordan arguments about race politics and long streams of verbal abuse. Stewart fit the editorial model of Green Lantern / Green Arrow better than Guy Gardner could, and DC mostly allowed the character to languish until 1985.

The Crisis Guy Gardner

In the voluminous changes Crisis on Infinite Earths involved, DC decided to revive the Guy character. The Hal Jordan Green Lantern had entered some storytelling territory that made his presence unlikely or undesirable, and no one seemed to want to use the latest version of (a toned-down) John Stewart as the central character bearing the Green Lantern title.

The Giffen-Era JLA Guy Gardner

This Guy Gardner enjoys the most incoming flak and the most ongoing controversy. In his days in the Justice League (in the diverse incarnations that team took after Crisis), Gardner took a different personality. The coma story served as an explanation, but one need not provide an "origin" story for a personality; Gardner's combination of self-centered arrogance, bellicose machismo, short attention span, and other adolescent flaws would either endear him to readers or annoy them enough to hope that he disappeared from Justice League titles.

Guy as Nuisance

Putting aside the question of some of the more improbable elements of his personality and history, however, one needs to look at the question of what makes a "good" character. Giffen and De Matteis portrayed Gardner as a jerk; but this rounded out a new approach (for DC) to its main superhero team by the inclusion of a character whose personality included more than exemplary values. Gardner provided a contrast against whom a reader might compare other characters; his grating personality provided the impetus for other character interactions; and episodes of good writing managed to scratch the surface to get at a deeper character who armored himself with his crass persona.

Handled properly, this version of Guy Garner could display some depth and even evoke sympathy, but different writers handled him differently. Sometimes he suffered from a sociopathic personality, other times he merely failed to contain his impulsiveness; and he ranged, in all subsequent revisions, between nobility and boorishness without much consistency to anchor the character or allow readers to figure out what drives him.

"Earnest" Guy Gardner

For no particular logical reason within the stories, Giffen / De Matteis added an element to the normally abrasive Gardner personality. In a number of stories, if Guy took just the right blow to the head, when he came to all of his nastiness would depart him. This in no way disposed of his considerable value as a nuisance.

Replacing the snide, sarcastic and impulsive "normal" Guy, we would find a sickeningly sweet character who fawned over the other Leaguers, aspired to ridiculous morals that would have made DC's heroes blush during their most noble days, and pestered other characters with his desire to inflict benevolence upon them.

Humor uses inversion as one of its tools, so readers who did not get the joke need not complain that Giffen and De Matteis somehow stepped into a foreign storytelling territory; however, their complaint comes because the "Earnest" Guy gag did not always work. It seemed more likely for a sixties sitcom than heroic comics, and some readers suffered disappointment from an inability to judge the latter by the standards of the former.

Miscellaneous Changes

The kernel of the character, established in the Justice League books, remained true throughout the various changes subsequent writers would impose upon him. Thus, when Guy lost his place in the Green Lantern Corps, he sought some way to continue as a superhero.

When bamboozling a mark, Guy demonstrates an intelligence that sometimes deserts him when confronted with a supervillain in need of a few cracked ribs. Guy demonstrated this in a scheme to get the deceased Sinestro's yellow power ring; Guy accompanied a number of interplanetary outlaws to the grave, found it still on Sinestro's finger, and allowed the inevitable squabbling over possession to follow. Then he pointed out that the ring no longer did anything, and his partners-in-pilferage let him have it; Guy then recharaged it and began his career as "Warrior," a name he would retain through several changes, including the loss of Sinestro's ring and a short-lived incarnation where he wore an extraterrestrial suit of armor.

None of these changes became grotesque, since no logical reason precludes the Green Lantern Corps from kicking him out, or Sinestro's ring from failing him, or Guy resorting to other means to acquire the power necessary to pursue a heroic career. Nonetheless, DC would completely remake the character with a background that required hundreds of thousands of years of previous history - at that time, none of which had appeared in print - to explain what they would make of Guy Gardner.

The Post-Zero Hour Guy Gardner

After the changes that Zero Hour: Crisis in Time wrought on the character, one wonders why DC didn't simply set the character adrift. The changes, after all, represented such a fundamental reworking of his history that nothing of his original conception remained relevant.

Guy's new powers reflected a backwards interpretation of the powers of a Green Lantern. Instead of creating helpful energy constructs from a green beam projected by a ring and controlled by the user's imagination and will power, Guy found that he could manufacture weapons and armor from the very tissues of his body as the situation demanded. Nothing in this notion really undermined the character.

To explain the origin of Guy's new powers, however, DC rewrote his history and that of his family to the tune of tens or hundreds of thousands of years, creating an alien race that bred into mankind. Guy, so it turned out, enjoyed extraterrestrial blood, and in him long-recessive alien traits had become dominant. Guy not only lost his history as a Green Lantern, but his membership in the human race in this poorly-executed revision of the character. Guy became a Vuldarian (or a crossbreed with both Vuldarian and human blood), erupted in permanent colorful skin markings, and somehow represented the product of generations of selective breeding by the exiled Vuldarian community to bring out the submerged traits and powers.

If Guy had presented a weaker personality through his many years of brassy appearances, DC might have given in to the temptation to abandon the character as it had to abandon the ridiculously convoluted Hawkman (read about that here). Unlike Hawkman, however, Guy Gardner could suffer a change in powers, a change in ranking among superheroes, and even a change in physical appearance, yet still present a recognizeable character. The things that made some readers hate him made most readers able to recognize him through jarring changes.

Bravely, though, DC continued with the character, using him as one of the stable of background characters in Green Lantern after DC disposed of Hal Jordan and brought in the contraversial Kyle Raynor. This team of supporting characters has some promise to become interesting; it includes Sentinel (the Golden Age Green Lantern), Jade and Obsidian (the children of Sentinel), the extraterrestrial Guy Gardner, and occasionally Donna Troy (once Wonder Girl, but retcons may have stripped that away from the character).

While we can't really call this reworked character a success, in that he supports neither his own title nor a major role within a group title, we can nonetheless recognize in him less of a failure than that suffered by those characters and groups on the receiving ends of drastic retconning. At least a recognizeable center remains underneath the new paint.